Calculating time

In 1831, Alexander Johnson, a British colonial officer, published an account of marriage customs in South India among Hindus and Muslims.Footnote ¹² The account was drafted by a number of local researchers working under the first Surveyor General of India, Colin Mackenzie.Footnote ¹³ Collected between 1815 and 1821, the account noted that part of the marriage preparations for Hindus included composing a ‘lagan-patra’ (lagna patra), a document that recorded the most auspicious day for the marriage to take place.Footnote ¹⁴

Determining such a day has a very long history in South Asia and is still part of modern-day marriage preparations. Very early texts such as the R̥gveda and the Gr̥hyasūtra state that an auspicious day for a wedding is determined by certain celestial events such as whether the moon is waxing (a good sign), locating a favourable asterism (nakṣatra), avoiding certain months, and knowing the direction of the sun along its ecliptic (typically a northern direction is preferred).Footnote ¹⁵

In the period under consideration in this article, the lagna of a marriage was also exceptionally important. In fact, it was so important that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, marriage agreements explicitly stated that the ceremony would be performed in accordance with the time of an identified lagna. Such documents were called sambandha patras or letters of matrimonial union. Addressed to the father of the groom, these sambandha patras were composed in the name of the father of the bride and might also include information such as the amount of dowry to be given, the place of residence of the bride’s father, and the name of the mediator facilitating the marriage between both parties. A representative example of a sambandha patra, composed in the name of a high-caste individual in eighteenth-century Bengal, reads:

Most obviously, this example demonstrates that the sambandha patra is a marriage agreement ratified between the two fathers. And it is an agreement formalized on the basis of the caste status of the groom’s family—a status represented in the figure of the groom’s father. In this and other surviving sambandha patras, this caste basis underwrote the exchange of money in the form of dowry or paṇ—a term Ronald Inden describes as the ‘distinctive gift of wealth’ given to the father of the bride ‘in exchange for the benefits of rank that flowed from a marriage’ with his family.Footnote ¹⁷

More subtly, however, this example demonstrates that the sambandha patra is a document that subsumes certain social and economic actions—the act of marriage, the documentary practices, and the exchange of dowry—within a lagna. And so, while the lagna to which Lālamohana and his mediator, Vīracandra, declare their adherence is a particular lagna beneficial to Dāmnīdevī and Guruprasāda in accordance with their horoscopes, the broader purpose of the sambandha patra is to leverage a lagna for framing and organizing action.

Successfully adhering to a lagna—to a specific moment—had two requirements. First, it required a device to measure time precisely and reliably. And second, it required someone with specialized knowledge to use such a device.

The most popular device in South Asia before the mid-nineteenth century that provided such reliably precise temporal measurement was the (inflow) water clock.Footnote ¹⁸ The importance of the water clock in a marriage ceremony before the mid- to late nineteenth century is difficult to overstate. In fact, texts were written that praised the device. For example, a Sanskrit text from the early eighteenth century, studied by Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma, includes a verse that reads: ‘O water clock, you have been created by Brahmā as the foremost among [time-measuring] instruments. O auspicious one, be the means for determining the auspicious time (śubha-kāla) for the couple’.Footnote ¹⁹

What exactly was the water clock? In this period the water clock was an inflow system in which a suitably constructed copper bowl, commonly called a ghaṛī or a kaṭorī, was placed in a larger receptacle of water.Footnote ²⁰ The copper bowl contained a small hole in the bottom; once the bowl was completely submerged, the passing of a unit of time called a ghaṭikā (also ghaṛī), equal to 24 minutes in mechanical-clock time, was marked.Footnote ²¹ Some seventeenth-century descriptions of the water clock suggest that the copper bowl could also be large enough to measure more than one ghaṭikā.Footnote ²² And, in addition to the time unit of the ghaṭikā, smaller time units were also part of this time-measuring system: one ghaṭikā consists of 60 vighaṭikās (also called pala or viṇāḍi), a measure of time equal to 24 seconds in mechanical-clock time.Footnote ²³ Thus, water-clock time is expressed, for example, as 4 ghaṭikās and 16 vighaṭikās (96 minutes and 384 seconds; or 102 minutes and 6 seconds). Finally, the water clock measures 60 ghaṭikās in total each day; and this counting starts and ends at mean sunrise. So, 4 ghaṭikās approximates to 96 minutes past sunrise in mechanical-clock time.Footnote ²⁴

Such a system of time measurement, whereby a small copper bowl continually sinks to the bottom of a larger receptacle of water, meant that the water clock had to be continuously monitored and reset in its receptacle. In technical settings such as mathematical and astral calculations, the copper bowl might be ‘very scientifically marked in Sanscrit characters’, as noted in eighteenth-century descriptions.Footnote ²⁵ When so marked, the person charged with watching the water clock would know the precise vighaṭikā of the ghaṭikā (or ‘minute of the hour’) through observation. But it was more commonly the case that the copper bowl would be unmarked. In these cases, the vighaṭikās could still be counted through the recitation of certain Sanskrit verses called pala-vr̥tti: verses that, as discussed by Sarma, consist of 60 long syllables, which, when recited, make up one pala (that is, one vighaṭikā or 24 seconds).Footnote ²⁶

The requirement to constantly monitor the water clock led to certain anxieties around time measurement during marriage ceremonies. Missing or deviating from the time of the lagna had severe consequences: the marriage could not take place or, if it did, it would have an ill-fated outcome. Such anxieties found their way into literary texts of the period. For example, the Kathāratnākara, composed by Hemavijaya (circa 1600, Ahmedabad), recounts a story in which a father wanted to get his daughter married even though it was destined that her husband would die after six months of marriage. Although her father found a proper lagna to ward off such an outcome, when he was setting up the water clock, he did not notice that a grain of rice had fallen from his forehead mark and had blocked the aperture of the bowl. This resulted in him missing the lagna and, while he still got his daughter married, her husband died from a snake bite six months later.Footnote ²⁷

A similar turn of events to those in the Kathāratnākara is recounted by Abū al-Fayḍ Fayḍī in the preface to his Persian translation, completed in 1587, of Bhāskara II’s twelfth-century mathematical treatise, the Līlāvatī (composed in Sanskrit).Footnote ²⁸ In his preface, Abū al-Fayḍ Fayḍī explains why Bhāskara named his book after his daughter, Līlāvatī: she was so curious about the water clock during the marriage ceremony that she leant over to watch it more closely, but as she did, a pearl fell from her garment and blocked the aperture. Her father and a ‘time-knowing astrologer’ (munajjim-i sā‘at-i shinās) waited for the ‘prescribed time’ (sā‘at-i ma‘hūd) or the ‘particular moment’ (sā‘at-i khās) when the water clock would sink, but it never did. The time of the lagna passed, preventing his ‘ill-starred’ (badakhtar) daughter from marrying. And, as a conciliatory gesture, he named the book after her.Footnote ²⁹

In fulfilling the purpose of noting the precise moment for a marriage, the water clock was the device through which temporal precision was realized in marriage ceremonies in South Asia (at least before the late nineteenth century). The successful realization of temporal precision provided by the water clock is the reason why Abū al-Fayḍ Fayḍī speaks of the ‘particular moment’ of the marriage repeatedly in this passage. In enabling the marriage to adhere to the requirement that it occur not just at any moment but a particular one, the water clock is what makes this precise moment in time phenomenologically available—and is what makes the water clock an object of fascination and, conversely, anxiety.Footnote ³⁰

Yet, even if one has a water clock, the ability to use it for a marriage ceremony required specialized knowledge, which belonged to astrologers. We witnessed such a role played by the astrologer in Abū al-Fayḍ Fayḍī’s preface and also by Padmāvatī in the Caṇḍīmaṅgal. In the sambandha patras as well, an astrologer would have been required to act as a proxy for the bride’s father in ensuring that the marriage ceremony was performed at the precise time of the identified lagna.

The central role of astrologers in a marriage ceremony and their use of a water clock was widely acknowledged in the period under discussion. In an official order (farmān) issued during the reign of Emperor Shāh Jahān, most likely between 1627 and 1635, a dispute between two astrologers or joshīs from the Berar province (in modern-day Maharashtra) is adjudicated.Footnote ³¹ The dispute was about who held the right to officiate and carry out wedding ceremonies in the district of Basim (Washim) after the head astrologer, Nīma Bhaṭṭa, had returned from Banaras. Nīma Bhaṭṭa had gone to Banaras for further study and had left his deputy, Dāda Bhaṭṭa, in charge; he had arranged that upon his return from Banaras, Dāda Bhaṭṭa would once again act as deputy. But after Nīma Bhaṭṭa’s return, Dāda Bhaṭṭa did not agree to the arrangement and instead continued to carry out marriage services as if he were the head astrologer. The farmān records the adjudication of this dispute and concludes in favour of Nīma Bhaṭṭa by reasserting his legal prerogative to conduct marriage ceremonies and further specifies that he holds the office of the joshī as the head astrologer.

Most importantly for our discussion here, however, the farmān lists the paraphernalia required for undertaking astrological-related activities. For example, in reference to the activities of Dāda Bhaṭṭa, the document states that,

Similarly, in reference to the activities of Nīma Bhaṭṭa, the farmān states that he shall have ‘the office of the joshī of the [specified] villages and the required items thereof including a Ganesh idol, brass bangles, a water clock, the document noting the auspicious day of marriage, unhusked rice, and [other] documents’.Footnote ³³

The importance of these quotations from the farmān is that they list the tools of astral-scientific practice used by an astrologer when officiating a marriage. Most notably, the water clock and the document noting the auspicious day of marriage (the lagna patra) are both recognized here as essential to this activity. The mention of these items demonstrates and acknowledges, then, that the use of the water clock and the production of the lagna patra in the context of a marriage was a domain of knowledge specific to astrologers.

What exactly was the specialized knowledge of an astrologer vis-à-vis a water clock? Although technical, let me briefly outline the method employed by an astrologer to calculate a lagna and use the water clock.Footnote ³⁴ Given that a marriage ceremony needs to occur during the ascendency of a specific planetary arrangement such as asterism (as determined by consulting the horoscopes of each individual getting married), an astrologer needs to calculate a lagna as it occurs at both the celestial equator of the earth and at the apparent eastern horizon of the earth—the horizon as observed by the marriage participants. In order to do this, the astrologer first calculates the synodic longitude of the sun on a particular day and then, second, converts a particular planetary arrangement into the synodic longitude as well, most likely from available astrological charts.Footnote ³⁵ Once both of these longitudes are calculated, the astrologer then calculates the degree of difference between each. Their degree of difference is then converted into ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās: six degrees equals one ghaṭikā.Footnote ³⁶ For example, if the degree of difference between the sun and an asterism on the apparent eastern horizon is 130 degrees, then this would convert into 21 ghaṭikās and 40 vighaṭikās. But such a conclusion is only confirmed on the basis of two remaining calculations. First, the astrologer takes into consideration the latitude of the location of the wedding so that the ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās are calculated according to the apparent eastern horizon, not only the celestial equator of the earth. And second, the astrologer takes into consideration the precession degree (ayanāṃśa) of the year, which slightly alters the ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās.Footnote ³⁷ Once all these calculations are completed, the astrologer knows the terrestrial time of the lagna on a particular day for a particular place or latitude; that is, the astrologer knows the time (the ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās) when the apparent eastern horizon of the earth intersects with the desired ascendant asterism. Finally, on the day of the marriage, the astrologer sets the water clock in its larger receptacle of water keyed to the sunrise if the lagna occurs between ghaṭikās 1–30 or the sunset if the lagna occurs between ghaṭikās 30–60. Then the astrologer must count how many times the bowl sinks to keep track of time; and, at the ghaṭikā during which the lagna occurs, he may also have to count the passing of vighaṭikās through recitation or observation depending on whether or not the bowl is marked.

A final question relates to how long a lagna may last. While an answer to this question is dependent upon the celestial arrangement to which a terrestrial activity is being aligned, it is not necessarily a short duration. An example is provided by the well-known diarist, Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709–1761, Pondicherry). Ranga Pillai was an early adopter of the mechanical clock, keeping one in his home; and he appears to have been especially sensitive to recording the time.Footnote ³⁸ In his diary, he makes extensive use of mechanical-clock and water-clock time to record his daily activities. On 4 June 1746, he attended the marriages of the two daughters of the influential merchant, Seshachala Chetti, which had the same lagna (or muhūrtam, as he terms it).Footnote ³⁹ In his diary he notes that the marriages ‘took place, during one and the same Muhûrtam [lagna], between the 12th and 15th Indian hour [ghaṭikā], on Saturday night last, 20th Vaigâsi [4th June]’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Ranga Pillai’s remark would mean that the lagna took place for about 72 minutes between approximately 10.43pm and 12.00am.Footnote ⁴¹

These sources emphasize that the water clock was the essential device of the marriage ceremony. And when used in conjunction with astral calculations and the astrologer’s trained observation of it (which included recitation of pala-vr̥tti verses, if needed), the water clock provided reliable and precise time measuring that enabled adherence to the time of an identified lagna, as promised by the father of the bride in his sambandha patra.

The use of the water clock in the marriage ceremony most likely continued into the late nineteenth century. Although the mechanical clock was becoming increasingly popular from the 1760s, especially in Presidency towns, the precision of mechanical clocks and watches remained unreliable into the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, as discussed by Projit Mukharji in a study on colonial Calcutta.Footnote ⁴² In addition, as noted by Mukharji, the use of watches and clocks in the first half of the nineteenth century was primarily confined to urban settings and most likely to non-Bengali speakers. Repair shops were confined to Calcutta and local watch repair shops managed by Bengali speakers are not documented in the city until 1847.Footnote ⁴³ Elsewhere, in late nineteenth-century Lahore, the Lahore Museum started using a water clock to keep time at the insistence of its curator, J. L. Kipling (1873–1893), since ‘the [mechanical] clock was always getting out of order’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In all likelihood, then, the use of the water clock in marriage ceremonies, especially in rural areas, continued into the late nineteenth century not only due to its reliably precise time measuring but also due to the ease of usage, repair, and manufacture.

However, the mechanical clock appears to have slowly replaced the water clock from the late nineteenth century onwards. Edgar Thurston, superintendent at the Madras Government Museum (1885–1908), notes that along the Malabar coast he witnessed marriage ceremonies in which only the groom was in charge of the water clock (rather than an astrologer or priest with specialized knowledge) while the priest used a mechanical clock.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to Thurston, although the water clock continued to be included among the paraphernalia of the marriage ceremony, its place there was largely symbolic since its appearance was only necessary for the priest to receive his payment.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this example, the marriage ceremony appears to have become a space of the mechanical clock and a deracinated water clock with ill-determined uses by astrologers.

These sources from colonial Calcutta, Lahore, and South India suggest, then, that it was only in the late nineteenth century that temporal aesthetics and habits related to the water clock in the context of the marriage ceremony were changing under pressure from an increasingly reliable mechanical clock. And this appears to have led to a change in the instrument used for observing a lagna: from the water clock to the mechanical clock.

The work of the water/mechanical clock in a marriage ceremony was to display the moment, so calculated, when celestial and terrestrial planes aligned with each other such that a celestially defined auspiciousness was known to envelop a terrestrially bound act of marriage. Here, a lagna appears to be produced by astral-scientific observation and social-cultural values. In both cases, however, its production relied not only upon technologies of time measurement but also care for a conception of time in which astral events have relevance for the timing of activities in practical life.Footnote ⁴⁷ And because an intentionally calculated lagna had a direct bearing on the timing of activities in practical life such as the activities of a marriage ceremony, once a lagna was made, it was documented and announced.

Documenting time

The lagna of a marriage was so important that it was given its own documentary life: the lagna patra. The practice of writing a lagna patra is found across South Asia. In the prior section, for example, we discussed evidence from South India and Maharashtra. Nevertheless, its historical evidence is limited. In this section, I focus predominantly on Bengal, given the availability of sources in this region.

In Bengal, the writing of a lagna patra assumed the existence of the sambandha patra (and other documents such as the horoscopeFootnote ⁴⁸) as a condition for its composition. And, just like the sambandha patra, it was also written in the name of the father of the bride. While the lagna patra further extends the temporal perspective first articulated in the sambandha patra, its purpose is much different. The lagna patra announces when the lagna of a marriage will occur and, in its most formal form, may also state that the ceremonial actions undertaken during a lagna will be in accordance with scriptural injunctions. But whether it is highly formalized or not, the lagna patra always states that the father (or a male relative) will ‘give away’ the bride.

For example, consider a lagna patra from western Bengal written in 1797 in the town of Bilbagram (Nadia district). It reads:

As a genre of writing, the lagna patra could be surprisingly stable in its form. Lagna patras written in the first half of the nineteenth century could use the exact same phrasing. This suggests that, like the sambandha patras, lagna patras were also templatized. For example, a lagna patra written in 1840 from western Bengal in the town of Jambani (Bankura district) contains the exact same phrasing and terminology as the lagna patra quoted above. It identifies that the lagna will occur at night and the father of the bride pledges to give away his daughter according to scriptural injunctions.Footnote ⁵⁰

In its less formal forms, the lagna patra may simply contain the pledge of the father or a male relative to give away the bride on a particular date. For example, a lagna patra written in 1836 concerns the marriage of two brides who are the cousins of an individual named Maheścandra Mukhopādhyāya. Maheścandra writes to the father of the two grooms that his two cousins will travel to their village, and he says that ‘On the 2nd of the month of Baishak, I shall give away the daughters of my uncle, Sāmā Sundari and Jādumani. Having decided this, I wrote down and gave you this lagna patra.’Footnote ⁵¹

At other times, the lagna patra and sambandha patra could be combined into a single document. In one such document dated 7 August 1826, a father named Vaidyanātha Śarman from the town of Shariphpur in the Jessore district (modern-day Bangladesh) agrees to an intermarriage of his son and daughter with the daughter and son of another father, Rāmagovinda Śarman Cakravartin, in the town of Amodpur on the periphery of Dhaka. Vaidyanātha notes that he will bring his daughter to Amodpur from the town of Shariphpur on 4 September, less than a month from the composition of the document, and pledges that ‘I will give my daughter away.’Footnote ⁵²

Curiously, despite the fact that the lagna patra records the date and even the portion of the synodic day when the identified lagna will take place, none of the lagna patras referred to above mention the specific time—the ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās—when it will occur. Why this was the case is difficult to say for certain. Perhaps such information was only shared orally; or perhaps this information was considered specialized knowledge. As quoted in the previous section, Ananda Ranga Pillai does mention the time of the lagna of the marriages he attended. But this may be a result of the fact that he was an especially time-sensitive individual, as demonstrated in his diary.

A more likely reason why the specific time of the lagna was not recorded in ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās in the lagna patra was that this level of temporal detail was not needed for general marriage preparations and attendees. In the lagna patra quoted above in full, for example, the bride’s father does specify the portion of the synodic day when the identified lagna takes place: at night (rātri).

It is this level of temporal detail—the particular portion of the synodic day—that appears to have been widely shared with those involved in wedding preparations. For example, in a short document dated 1795 from western Bengal (Jagannathpur), an individual from the groom’s side notes that he will arrange the transport (a palanquin) for a group of musicians performing at the marriage. And, in his dispatch, he specifies that the lagna of the marriage takes place at dusk (godhūlī).Footnote ⁵³ This document suggests, then, that most attendees understood the time of the marriage in terms of the part of the day in which the lagna was to occur, not through the time unit of the ghaṭikā.Footnote ⁵⁴

Outside the temporal frame of the lagna, this short document illustrates new practices occurring in tandem with marriage ceremonies. According to Anima Mukhopadhyay, the incorporation of music and other practices such as the hanging of canopies at marriages are only documented in Bengal from the late fifteenth century in texts such as the Manasāmaṅgal and Caṇḍīmaṅgal. Mukhopadhyay argues that since these texts are closely connected to the trading community in Bengal, these practices most likely began among the merchant classes at this time, slowly becoming absorbed by other social groups.Footnote ⁵⁵

These new practices, which added to the cost of marriage functions, only grew in scope from the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries. As argued by Rochona Majumdar, lavish spending on marriages in Bengal in the nineteenth century correlated in part to the emergence of what she calls the marriage market.Footnote ⁵⁶ As explored by Majumdar, these changes, such as practices related to dowry, are criticized in nineteenth-century autobiographies as evidence that materialistic concerns were becoming more dominant in marriage arrangements than was the case earlier.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, as Panchanan Mandal has shown, the average cost of a marriage (including dowry) in mid-eighteenth-century Bengal was about Rs 14, but this amount could be far exceeded by wealthy and upper-caste families, especially in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ For example, one document from 1824, which calls itself a sambandha patra, primarily discusses the planned expenses of a marriage in western Bengal—more than Rs 319—and it makes no mention of the lagna.Footnote ⁵⁹

The extent to which the practice of calculating and documenting a lagna was part of these larger changes in marriage practices in Bengal from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries is complex. While there are examples where a lagna is calculated by those outside of caste and gender hierarchies such as Padmāvatī in the Caṇḍīmaṅgal, the undertaking of these calculations in seventeenth-century Bengal seems to have been a task closely connected to male Brahmins, as discussed by Mukhopadhyay.Footnote ⁶⁰ And the available examples of sambandha and lagna patras in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal demonstrate that fathers and their male mediators remained responsible for documenting and announcing the time of the lagna for a marriage ceremony.

Yet the above remarks speak only of the ‘who’ of practices related to calculating and documenting a lagna rather than the ‘what’ of these practices. While male Brahmins and/or male astrologers seem to have retained their role in calculating a lagna and fathers and their male mediators seem to have retained their role in documenting and announcing a lagna, two large changes appear to have taken place in the mid- to late nineteenth century. The first change, already registered, regards the technology used to observe—and, by extension, document—the time of a lagna. The apparent shift from the water clock to the mechanical clock, registered by Edward Thurston, in the late nineteenth century (and noted in the previous section) would have required that astrologers devise supplementary calculations when finding a lagna in order to translate from ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās into hours and minutes so as to read the mechanical clock correctly vis-à-vis an identified lagna.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, a consequence of marginalizing the water clock while centring the mechanical clock in the marriage ceremony would have meant that documenting a lagna—as Ananda Ranga Pillai does in his diary—would no longer be done using the time unit of the ghaṭikā but, instead, the hour.Footnote ⁶²

The second change is with regard to the documentary practices themselves. From the mid- to late nineteenth century, the practice of writing sambandha and lagna patras appears to have greatly reduced. At the same time, the practice of composing simple marriage invitations appears to have greatly increased. In early to mid-nineteenth-century Bengal, all three forms of documents circulated, each with a distinct purpose. In a sambandha patra, a father promised to perform the marriage ceremony at the time of an identified lagna; in a lagna patra, a father noted the date (and possibly the portion of the day) of an identified lagna and also promised to give away his daughter at that time; and in a marriage invitation, a father made a polite request to attend his daughter’s or son’s marriage and provided the date of the event. However, from the mid- to late nineteenth century, as documented by Rochona Majumdar, the practice of composing only marriage invitations appears to predominate.Footnote ⁶³

The preference for composing only marriage invitations rather than also sambandha and lagna patras during marriage preparations is found, on the basis of limited evidence, in both rural and urban settings in nineteenth-century Bengal. Invitations in these different settings had similarities but also important differences. For example, in rural and urban Bengal, marriage invitations often stated the date and location of the marriage and the names of the bride and groom and their fathers, but they usually did not use the term lagna.Footnote ⁶⁴ Marriage invitations could also be written in the first person by the groom.Footnote ⁶⁵

The differences, however, could be dramatic. For example, consider a marriage invitation from 1881 (Calcutta) announcing the marriage of an individual named Khetrachandra Basu Mullick.Footnote ⁶⁶ The invitation is written in English, and it notes the location of the event (near College Square). More importantly, however, the invitation notes the date and time of the marriage using mechanical-clock time: ‘Tuesday, the 14^th of June 1881, at 9 p.m.’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use of mechanical-clock time in marriage invitations continues into the early twentieth century. For example, a marriage invitation written in Bengali from 1934 (Calcutta) invites the recipient to attend the marriage ‘On the coming 21^st of Asharh, Friday (English date: 6th of July) at 9 o’clock at night’.Footnote ⁶⁸

In contrast, available marriage invitations from rural areas outside Calcutta in the late nineteenth century do not use mechanical-clock time. For example, a marriage invitation written in 1874 from the town of Navadvip (100 km north of Calcutta) retains modes of writing seen in lagna patras of the eighteenth century. It reads in part:

Here, the synodic portion of the day of the lagna is noted—as was the case in eighteenth-century lagna patras. And the use of the word susampanna suggests that the marriage will be ‘properly and well performed’ because it will be done in accordance with scriptural injunctions—as could also be stated in eighteenth-century lagna patras.

In the only study on marriage invitations from nineteenth-century Calcutta, Rochona Majumdar argues that the shift from composing sambandha and lagna patras to primarily marriage invitations occurred under pressure from an expanding legal sphere vis-à-vis Hindu marriage wrought by colonial rule. The sambandha and lagna patras were stripped of their ‘quasi-legal’ status to become merely a social phenomenon, undermining their ‘original functional intent’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Given the limited availability of these sources from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, I am hesitant to make any additional claims. Nevertheless, we can speculate on the consequences of such a shift. The shift away from composing sambandha and lagna patras to primarily marriage invitations would have meant that fathers and their male mediators would no longer need to document their promise that a marriage would occur at the time of an identified lagna, nor would they need to document their promise that a marriage would follow scriptural injunctions. In such a shift, then, the scope of the lagna appears contracted vis-à-vis marriage preparations, making superfluous certain actions originally undertaken out of care for documenting and announcing adherence to an identified lagna.Footnote ⁷¹

If time is made sense of through its units of measure, its technologies of measurement, and forms of documentation that, as ‘tools’ of temporal practice, ‘school[] perception, attention, judgment, and memory’, in the words of Lorraine Daston (writing about scientific practice in the eighteenth century), then the consequences of these historical changes on conceptions of time in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia—measuring the lagna in hours and minutes rather than in ghaṭikās and vighaṭikās, shifting the technology of time measurement from water clock to mechanical clock, and new documentary practices in which the scope of the lagna contracts vis-à-vis marriage preparation activities—remain an open (and looming) question, though far too large to address here.Footnote ⁷² Yet, no matter what or who was calculating and documenting the lagna and no matter the time units used to measure and notate it in such calculations or documentation, the lagna would have retained its central role of giving meaning to the act of marriage—that to which all action associated with a marriage ceremony must conform. And because all action associated with a marriage ceremony must conform to the time of a lagna, once it was made and then documented (even if, in that documentation, it was not explicitly referred to), a lagna was put to work.

Debating time

The previous two sections have attempted to demonstrate that a lagna—as the moment of a marriage—is made through, and documented in, a set of temporal practices. The use of the water clock (though most likely slowly replaced by the mechanical clock from the late nineteenth century onwards) and astral calculations are perhaps the most obvious, but I would argue that the production of the sambandha patra, lagna patra, and marriage invitation as well as the engagement of astrologers and mediators are also temporal practices (not only social and economic ones), given that they are undertaken out of a concern for, or a promise of, adhering to an identified lagna.

Once a lagna is brought into being and then documented and announced, it is put to use. As explored in this section, the primary work that the lagna of a marriage ceremony does is that it frames and thereby makes efficacious that action in the marriage ceremony through which the individuals getting married are transformed. The idea that an individual is transformed in ritual settings, such as in life-cycle rites, has been addressed in prior studies. Ron Inden and Ananya Vajpeyi, for example, have both discussed how, in the course of rites such as a kingly coronation, an individual attains a ‘new status’ and is transformed into a king.Footnote ⁷³ The transformative power of a marriage is, of course, more complex: it involves the transformation of two people at the same time (within the same lagna).

Philosophers and jurists writing in Sanskrit between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries were very concerned with the transformative effects of marriage. In their view, the marriage ceremony is when a bride is made into a wife and a property relation is made to obtain between bride and groom, making the groom appear as an owner.

Concern about the transformative effects of a marriage on the bride led the well-known jurist Raghunandana Bhaṭṭācārya (circa 1540, Bengal) and the nyāya philosopher Gadādhara Bhaṭṭācārya (circa 1660, Bengal) to compose essays on marriage. For them, marriage is the moment when a new feature of a bride emerges: the feature being-a-wife or wife-ness (bhāryātva). No longer a girl (kanyā) nor simply a woman (nārī), this new feature stands for a new subjectivity on the part of a bride.

Both Raghunandana and Gadādhara enquired into how the feature of being-a-wife was produced, and they ended up with slightly different answers. For Raghunandana, this new subjectivity emerges as a result of the groom ‘taking’ (grahaṇa) the bride. This act occurs when the groom takes the bride’s hand during the moment of the pāṇi-grahaṇa (the taking of the hand)—a point in the ceremony when her father or a suitable male alternate gives the bride away to the groom (kanyādāna), following which the groom leads the bride around the fire.Footnote ⁷⁴

Relying heavily on quotations from the Manusmr̥ti and the Viṣṇupurāṇa, Raghunandana argues that,

For Raghunandana, the act of taking requires a subject and object; and these identities are assigned to the groom and bride, respectively. The idea is that the act of taking as a movement and as a cognition is an activity of and inheres in the groom. And, because this act and cognition of taking require an object, this object is identified as the bride.

Gadādhara takes up the same question (namely, how does the feature of being-a-wife arise in a bride?) but provides a slightly different answer. Starting with Raghunandana’s view, Gadādhara writes that,

Gadādhara supplements Raghunandana’s argument by providing us with the cognition that occurs on the part of the groom as he takes the bride when she is given away by her father in the ceremony, namely, ‘This is my wife’.

But Gadādhara objects to the conclusion that the act of taking, with its corresponding cognition (‘This is my wife’), engenders the feature being-a-wife in a bride. For Gadādhara, marriage may also occur among children who are too young to have this cognition, throwing into question the idea that ‘taking’ is what results in this new feature of a bride.Footnote ⁷⁷

Ultimately, Gadādhara’s position is that it is not a ‘taking’ which produces the feature being-a-wife in a bride but rather what he calls an ‘assenting to accept’ (svīkāra).Footnote ⁷⁸ Gadādhara’s main argument is that,

Gadādhara’s argument, then, is that it is an ‘assenting to accept’—not a ‘taking’—that engenders this new feature of a bride, being-a-wife. And since, for Gadādhara, such an action does not require the cognition, ‘This is my wife’, it is a better definition of marriage because it does not exclude any marriage in which the groom is not able to entertain this cognition such as marriages among children. Gadādhara does not explain why ‘assenting to accept’ does not entail the cognition, ‘This is my wife’. Indeed, assenting to accept something still seems to require an object. Perhaps he means to argue that unlike the act of taking, ‘assenting to accept’ is a pre-inferential stance whereby the groom accepts the bride without undertaking any inferential cognition about what the bride is after he has accepted her: that, in ‘assenting to accept’ the bride, the groom does not need to cognize her in the capacity as his wife for the feature being-a-wife to arise in her. Unfortunately, Gadādhara does not address these issues.

Whether we agree with Raghunandana or Gadādhara, however, it is clear that it is at this particular point in the marriage ceremony—either through a ‘taking’ or an ‘assenting to accept’ by the groom as the bride is given to him by her father—when the transformation of the bride takes place: from a girl to a woman qualified by the feature of being-a-wife.

A much different situation, however, applies to the groom. Neither Gadādhara nor Raghunandana argue that the act of marriage transforms a groom into a husband: ‘Husband-ness’ (patitva), for example, is not theorized by Gadādhara or Raghunandana as a feature that emerges on the part of the groom when he takes or assents to accept the bride. For the very different effects of marriage on the groom, we have to turn to the philosopher Gokulanātha Upādhyāya (Mithila, northern Bihar, circa 1680–1740).Footnote ⁸⁰

In a major work, Gokulanātha reflects upon the well-known story in the Mahābhārata when the five Pāṇḍava brothers marry Draupadī. In this episode, a misunderstanding occurs when the brothers return home after Draupadī has chosen to marry Arjuna at her ceremony of self-selecting a husband (svayaṃvara). From a distance, Arjuna announces to his mother, Kuntī, that he has brought something home. However, she thinks he is speaking about alms and, without looking, instructs him to share it with his brothers. Since no one wants Kuntī to speak untruthfully about what her sons should do, Yudhiṣṭhira resolves the problem by deciding that each brother should marry Draupadī.Footnote ⁸¹

Gokulanātha very briefly reflects on this episode in order to consider what sort of relation obtains between each of the five brothers and Draupadī after they have all completed their marriage ceremonies. He states that the relation that obtains between each brother and Draupadī is a property relation (svatva). But, as Gokulanātha explains, this property relation is temporally distributed across the five brothers vis-à-vis Draupadī. He writes:

What Gokulanātha expresses here, in my view, is the idea that the relation that obtains between a husband and wife can be understood as a temporalized property relation. In the case of the Pāṇḍava brothers and Draupadī, this property relation is temporally distributed across the five brothers, given that each of them is married to her. In my reading, part of the reason for such a temporally distributed property relation has to do with the fact that each of them, in their acceptance of her within a marriage ceremony, contributed to her new subjectivity as a wife; as such, this subjectivity is qualified in five different ways with respect to each brother.Footnote ⁸³ Stated more formally, because the property relation (svatva) appears here as a polyadic relation obtaining between each of the five brothers and Draupadī, Gokulanātha argues, in my view, for a temporal distribution of their use of Draupadī in her capacity as a wife who is each their own (sva).

Such a distribution suggests, more practically, that Draupadī must be shared because each brother has a temporal claim to her. Their (potentially competing) temporal claims to Draupadī are explicitly recognized in the southern recension of the Mahābhārata where an agreement is made between the brothers to prevent any conflicts that may now arise between them. Here, the text reads:

While I do not know whether Gokulanātha was reading this recension of the Mahābhārata, this seems to be exactly his point: that the brothers now need to arrange their relationship to Draupadī in a time-based manner (that is, each brother is with her at different times) in recognition of a temporally distributed ‘use’ of her in accordance with the polyadic property relation obtaining between them and Draupadī.

My interpretation of Gokulanātha (namely, that a temporalized property relation obtains between husband and wife) would also apply to the situation when only two individuals are married. In such circumstances, when a marriage involves only two people, the property relation would not be polyadic but rather dyadic and would thus not be temporally distributed. In such cases, a dyadic property relation between husband and wife would be one that is temporally universalized such that a husband’s use of his wife as that which is his own (sva) is never interrupted because no one else has a competing temporal claim to her on the basis of a property relation (svatva) to her.

The arguments by Raghunandana, Gokulanātha, and Gadādhara are important for identifying the most significant action in the marriage ceremony: the act of taking or the act of assenting to accept the bride by the groom. Of course, it must be admitted that their arguments do not mention that this action must occur during a lagna. Yet, in my view, their arguments must rely on the fact that that action (a taking or an assenting to accept) takes place within an identified lagna of a marriage. Indeed, it must be remembered that the lagna patra explicitly states that the father of the bride will give his daughter away in a marriage ceremony that takes place in adherence to the time of an identified lagna. If we accept such a view—and I think we must—that that action (a taking or an assenting to accept) occurs within a lagna, then the work that the lagna of a marriage does is that it frames that action (a taking or an assenting to accept) whereby the bride emerges transformed as a wife—as one who has the feature being-a-wife—and the groom (when cognitively able) emerges as one who knows the bride as his own and as someone he can use; that is, it appears the groom emerges as an owner of the bride in her capacity as his wife. Of course, outside a lagna the action of taking or assenting to accept retains its mundane meanings and remains inefficacious as a transformative action. Yet this underscores precisely why a lagna is so important and is the moment to which a marriage ceremony must adhere (as promised by the father of the bride in his sambandha and lagna patras). When outside the frame of a lagna, the transformations of the bride and groom cannot take place because the action that brings such transformations into effect (the taking or assenting to accept) loses its transformative meaning and thus its transformative efficacy.

The idea that a husband is transformed into an owner of his wife is an admittedly stark conclusion. However, any contemporary reader of Gokulanātha and Gadādhara would immediately connect their arguments to concurrent theories on property. Philosophers from Bengal to Banaras in the seventeenth century argued that when a property relation obtains between an individual, say Caitra, and an asset, then a cognition arises that, ‘This is Caitra’s asset’ (caitrasyêdaṃ dhanaṃ).Footnote ⁸⁵ Significantly, this cognition is the exact same form as the cognition provided by Gadādhara when someone knows a bride to be his wife, namely, ‘This is my wife’ (mamêyaṃ bhāryā). Such similarities mean that philosophers were thinking about the relation between husband and wife through theories on property. At the same time, however, P. V. Kane has noted that Sanskrit scholars were themselves divided on the question of whether a wife is owned by her husband. Those scholars who argued against such a view held instead that a husband had control over his wife but did not own her.Footnote ⁸⁶

The issue of ownership aside, its associated idea that a husband is able to ‘use’ his wife is a similarly unsettling position.Footnote ⁸⁷ While Gokulanātha does define use generically as ‘the activity of employing a thing’, he never clarifies what this means when applied to a wife.Footnote ⁸⁸ Understanding its meaning, then, falls to the reader.

I would argue that one’s use of something cannot occur without it being present in time with oneself. Such an understanding is implicit in the arrangement agreed to by the five Pāṇḍava brothers quoted above. Their use of Draupadī means that she must be present in time with them: ‘sitting with’ (samāsīna) each of them separately for the duration of one year.

The conception of use I am suggesting (a wife remaining present in time with her husband) finds both textual and historical expression. First, husband and wife can, and do, share property and perform sacrifices together.Footnote ⁸⁹ Second, and more importantly, historical examples abound from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries of wives taking part in activities together with their husbands, although often in an asymmetrical manner. Wives were owners of, and sold, household servants together with their husbands; they were present when their husbands settled a debt; they migrated and sold themselves for work with their husbands; and they participated in religious gatherings and gave gifts as ‘the wife of’ their husbands.Footnote ⁹⁰

These textual and historical examples demonstrate that after marriage (in the future) wives were present in time with their husbands and undertook a range of activities with them. And, because such a position would obviously not have been held prior to marriage, the moment of marriage would appear to anticipate such new activities and experiences as compared to before marriage (in the past).

The work that a lagna of a marriage does is that it is the temporal frame that makes efficacious that action—a taking or an assenting to accept—through which a new subjectivity of the bride and a property relation between bride and groom are able to emerge. And it is my claim that the reason a lagna of a marriage appears to interpolate the past and to be interlocutory to the future is that this subjectivity of the bride and the property relation that obtains between bride and groom, both of which can only emerge at this time and place, anticipate the beginning of a new history of the bride and groom being present in time together—a new history that starts from within the moment of marriage.Footnote ⁹¹